Film/Cinema (Australia)

Abstract

Australian cinema experienced a war of two halves during 1914-1918. The start was dominated by war dramas funded through private enterprise, telling sensational stories largely derived from British military traditions, and creating valuable free propaganda for the government. When their popularity died suddenly in early 1916, government-sponsored war documentaries took over, serving as both info-propaganda and fundraisers for the war effort. Post-war, cinema was a key propagator of the evolving Anzac legend, with its distinctively Australian identity. Its growing potency as the central national myth was most effectively articulated through cinema in the 1980s.